The device itself is enticing. It’s based on Google’s Android operating system, as most phones that don’t start with “i” are, and has the latest mobile innards: A Qualcomm Snapdragon 810 processor rated at 1.8 GHz, four gigabytes of memory, 64 gigabytes of storage, 13- and five-megapixel cameras, a fingerprint sensor, and a 5.5-inch screen (about on par with the iPhone 6). It’s a bit heavier than Apple’s model. (Is it better? I’ll leave it to Fortune’s Jason Cipriani, who will soon answer that question in a forthcoming review.)

Most important, it’s $329 without a contract. That seems expensive to American consumers used to phones (on contract) in the $200 range, but consider that the iPhone is roughly $650 without a two-year service plan and Samsung’s Galaxy S6 is $685. This is a strategy we’ve seen time and time again from Chinese manufacturers: Match the competition’s hardware and software and undercut them on price. It’s a page ripped directly from the South Korean playbook, itself ripped from the Japanese playbook. (For more on this dynamic, as well as the rise of OnePlus, read “Enter the Dragons,” Scott Cendrowski’s feature in the March 2015 issue of Fortune magazine.)

But despite the hyperbole and hyperventilation in the tech press this morning--”So good it makes me want to leave Verizon,” one early reviewer breathlessly wrote; “pushes the boundaries of what a flagship phone can be,” wrote another--the bigger strategic maneuver for OnePlus is clearly found in the business model. All smartphone makers are subject to the same hardware providers (unless they’re big enough to make proprietary components like Apple and Samsung). That leaves user experience (including customer service!) and price. What makes OnePlus different is its ability to match the former while achieving the latter, reportedly at cost. The marketing doesn’t hesitate to encourage it: “Never Settle” is the company’s slogan. “We believe that great products come from great ideas, not multi-million dollar marketing campaigns,” is a Samsung-targeted line it regularly trots out, even as it tries to reconcile both concepts in international courts of law.

It’s easy, of course, for a small company to punch up at the big giants; it’s got little to lose by starting a war with the incumbents. (Take note, 2016 U.S. presidential election contenders.) But OnePlus should not forget that those five companies--two Korean, one American, and two Chinese--comprise more than half of the global market for smartphones, per IDC’s latest estimates. While ascendant, OnePlus is still obscure to most consumers around the world, and it has yet to truly dominate its own, extraordinarily competitive home market. But with attitude aplenty, OnePlus may have already won an important battle before ever having shipped a single unit of its new model: The one for the minds of consumers who look at smartphones and see Apple, Samsung, and no one else. If this new device helps them see OnePlus, too, then it’s the kind of addition that all Chinese smartphone makers should cheer.

“As it turns out with every revolutionary product that Apple has created,” he said about the Watch and its crown, “a breakthrough in user interface was required.”

The Taiwanese electronics company Asus ASUUY seems to have taken note. Today the company introduced a second version of its Android Wear smartwatch, the ZenWatch 2, at tech expo Computex in Taiwan that seems to have drawn some aesthetic inspiration from the Apple Watch.

See that knob on the side? That wasn’t there before.

In its original report about the development, Vlad Savov, a reviewer for tech media site The Verge, speculated that the new feature might let people wearing the watch navigate its screen. Afterward, the site confirmed with the company that the knob is, in reality, just a nub.

Like the Apple Watch, the ZenWatch 2 has a metal crown, which gives you “a new way to interact” with the Android Wear interface. It initially seemed as though this would work like the digital crown on Apple’s watch, however it turns out to simply be a power button with a fancy title.

A reviewer at the technology site Engadget isn’t sold on the addition. “While the overall designs are similar to that of the original model, ASUS has now added a button on the side,” writes Richard Lai, “though we prefer the cleaner look without it.”

Apple watchers, too, have lately questioned the value of digital crown, and Apple AAPL itself seems to have backed off from its initially effusive praise of the wondrous wheel (or glorified button, depending on who you ask). At Apple’s March event for the Apple Watch, Cook said nothing about the dial.

Digital crown aside, there’s another similarity between Asus’ new offering and the Apple Watch. The ZenWatch 2 will be now available in more than one screen size: 49 millimeter and 45 millimeter. (Apple’s come in 42 millimeter and 38 millimeter.)

]]>http://fortune.com/2015/06/01/asus-zenwatch-apple-watch/feed/0Asus ZenWatch 2 2015rhhackettfortuneApple’s iPhone comes to Best Buy’s help in a huge wayhttp://fortune.com/2015/05/21/apple-best-buy/
http://fortune.com/2015/05/21/apple-best-buy/#commentsThu, 21 May 2015 14:50:56 +0000http://fortune.com/?p=1131303]]>Best Buy BBY gave investors’ another pleasant surprise on Thursday, this time in part courtesy of Apple’s AAPL iPhone 6.

The retailer, which many analysts for years had written off as a relic destined to disappear, keeps coming back with strong results, defying conventional wisdom and maintaining its appeal with shoppers who could easily buy its electronics on line.

Best Buy on Thursday reported U.S. comparable sales unexpectedly rose 0.6% in the quarter ended May 3, easily beating Wall Street forecasts for a 0.4% decline, according to Consensus Metrix, and helping it post a stronger than expected profit.

It’s not the first time that electronics retailer benefit from a runaway hit, of course, but Best Buy has in the last few years positioned itself to benefit better than most from such blockbuster products.

“We continued to take advantage of strong product cycles in large screen televisions and iconic mobile phones," said CEO Hubert Joly said. Those iconic mobile phones would of course largely be the iPhone 6, launched last winter, as well as Samsung’s Galaxy 6.

Best Buy also got some help from large TVs and its growing big appliance business (that it appears to be taking in part from Sears SHLD).

The retailer has been fighting back using the very thing people thought condemned it to obsolescence: its stores. The chain's growth plan is anchored on focusing on top brands in electronics and giving them a lot more prominence in stores. In 2014, it opened showrooms within its stores to showcase case products by Sony and Samsung. It has also previously had shop-in-shops for products by Microsoft MSFT and Beats headphones. And it has done a stellar job of integrating its e-commerce and stores for services like in-store pickup for online orders. These are some of reasons hit products like the iPhone have helped Best Buy but not RadioShack or hhgregg.

This "is what has allowed us to consistently outperform the market," Joly said.

The strong quarter follows a big rise in U.S. sales over the holiday season, belying the long held notion that Best Buy can’t keep up with the aggressive pricing of Amazon.com, AMZN Walmart WMT and Target TGT.

There was more good news from Best Buy: total company sales for the current quarter are set to decline less than Wall Street analysts expected (Best Buy is in the process of exiting China, and closing dozens of Canadian stores) because of what Chief Financial Officer Sharon McCollam called “a strengthening domestic consumer-electronics market.”

]]>http://fortune.com/2015/05/21/apple-best-buy/feed/0Best Buy Posts First Quarterly Profit In A YearpwahbaChina’s smartphone market contracts for first time in six yearshttp://fortune.com/2015/05/11/china-smartphone-market/
http://fortune.com/2015/05/11/china-smartphone-market/#commentsMon, 11 May 2015 13:14:15 +0000http://fortune.com/?p=1115613]]>The market for smartphones in China contracted 4% between last year and this year, a sign that its tremendous and sustained growth is finally starting to slow down.

Phone makers shipped 98.8 million units to Chinese consumers in the first quarter of 2015, according to market research firm IDC. It’s the first time in six years that the country’s market experienced a drop on a year over year basis. Quarter over quarter, the market contracted 8%--the result of a large inventory buildup at the end of last year.

IDC’s figures prove that out. The Chinese market is now so saturated that it’s beginning to resemble the United States, United Kingdom, or Japan, where most effort is focused on convincing existing customers to upgrade to a newer smartphone, rather than exchange a feature phone.

According to IDC, Apple was the top smartphone vendor in China in the first quarter of 2015, thanks to its iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus. Xiaomi, the well-funded Chinese startup (and No. 1 company on Fortune‘s Unicorn List), slipped to second position--the product of stiff competition in the low- and mid-range segment of the market. Huawei, another Chinese vendor, rounded out the top three. Neither Samsung or Lenovo made a showing in the top trio, a sign of how volatile China’s market remains for vendors.

The market research firm expects “relatively flat growth” for China in 2015, stronger competition in the high-end segment, and--as Cendrowski suggested--further expansion into India and other neighboring countries in Southeast Asia.

]]>http://fortune.com/2015/05/11/china-smartphone-market/feed/0Apple Inc. Launches iPhone 6 And iPhone 6 Plus In ChinasoccerrogueCan Will.i.am and an ex-Sony exec compete with Apple Watch?http://fortune.com/2015/03/10/william-sony-watch/
http://fortune.com/2015/03/10/william-sony-watch/#commentsTue, 10 Mar 2015 21:18:29 +0000http://fortune.com/?p=1023532]]>Even as Japanese conglomerate Sony has tossed its consumer electronics division all but overboard, favoring higher growth potential areas (e.g. movies and games) over laggards (like TVs and phones), Phil Molyneux, former COO and president of Sony Electronics USA, is moving with full steam ahead. He’s convinced wearable devices are the next big thing--and he’s not shy about letting people know.

On a call last month, Molyneux told Fortune he had joined hip-hop artist Will.i.am’s fashion-tech startup i.am+. (Will.i.am is best known as the founding frontman of pop outfit The Black Eyed Peas; less known as one of the founding members of Beats, last year snapped up by Apple; and less known as Will Adams, his birth name.) The two met in 2012 through a mutual friend at the Clinton Global Initiative, had kept in touch and eventually decided to collaborate, Molyneux said. As of Feb. 26, he had been named president and COO of Adams’ company.

Will.i.am and Molyneux’s partnership may seem a strange union. A platinum-pumping pop artist on one hand, a grizzled gadget veteran of the corporate world on the other. (Of course, Will.i.am is no stranger to the corporate world either.) But the beat-maker turned entrepreneur’s splashy hire lends credence to his dogged dream of marrying fashion and technology. (“We call it fashionology,” Molyneux deadpanned on the call.)

For Will.i.am’s part, he launched his hardware business because he saw an opportunity: “The tech world is not the expert in dressing people,” he pronounced in an October editorial in The Huffington Post. “I am not a freaking consumer electronics wizard,” he admitted, “but I am dreamer with a vision and I spot gaps in the market.”

During my chat with Molyneux, I could not help but imagine that i.am+ has decided to staff up in preparation for Apple to announce details of its highly anticipated Watch, which came on Monday. When I asked him whether he’s afraid Apple will dominate the market and crush its competitors--including i.am+’s version of the smart watch, the $399 Puls (pronounced “pulse”)--he interrupted. “It’s not a smart watch,” he said, “but a smart band.”

The device is more like a computerized bracelet than timepiece, he asserted, citing the digital bangle’s “beautiful design” as a “key differentiator.” (Say what you will, but it sure looks--and acts--like a smart watch.)

Semantics aside, Molyneux does not take Apple’s entrance as a bad thing. In fact, he thinks it’s the exact opposite. “Apple coming into the market is a good thing for everyone,” he told Fortune. “A rising tide lifts all boats, and brings visibility to this wearables market.”

Yet many of these wrist-wrapping gizmo makers--Samsung’s Gear, Pebble’s Steel, and Motorola’s Moto 360--surely must be facing a real existential crisis with Apple’s announcement looming large. (As you can hear in our latest Fortune Tech Debate, I’m on the record saying that Apple’s competitors may not stand a chance--at least in the short term.)

Molyneux’s conviction may mask a deeper anxiety. Consider that i.am+’s last attempt at a consumer product--an expensive iPhone camera add-on--bombed. And Puls has not received rave reviews either. (In the fall, a reviewer at The Verge dubbed it “objectively the worst product I’ve touched all year.” And they review plenty of products at The Verge.) But that’s for i.am+ to figure out, and Will.i.am, who made the hire.

Now that Molyneux is on board at the 85-person startup, he’ll be helping the company learn how to scale and plow forward. Can Will.i.am use the same kind of marketing genius on display in his hit song “Boom Boom Pow” to push i.am+ into the spotlight? (“I be rockin’ them Beats,” he intones, donning a pair of the oversize headphones in the music video. In fact, he rocked a portion of his Beats investment to jumpstart i.am+.) It remains to be seen.

]]>http://fortune.com/2015/03/10/william-sony-watch/feed/0Will.i.am wearing Puls bandrhhackettfortuneApple’s Tim Cook says the Apple Watch could replace car keyshttp://fortune.com/2015/02/27/tim-cook-apple-watch-car-keys/
http://fortune.com/2015/02/27/tim-cook-apple-watch-car-keys/#commentsFri, 27 Feb 2015 18:07:33 +0000http://fortune.com/?p=1009283]]>Apple is expected to formally unveil its next big product, the Apple Watch, at an event scheduled for March 9. The tech giant announced the product last fall, but has been gearing up for the smartwatch to officially go on sale in April and recently ordered an initial run of as many as 6 million units from its suppliers.

While the world already knows the basics of the watch -- it comes in three varieties and features phone and messaging capabilities and also offers music storage and works with Apple Pay -- but that doesn’t mean Apple customers haven’t been aching for more details about the new product.

On Friday, The Telegraph reported on CEO Tim Cook’s visit to a London branch of the Apple retail store, where the executive offered some tidbits on the Apple Watch as well as a comparison to one of his company’s most iconic products, the iPhone. Here’s what Cook discussed:

-- Cook thinks people will discover all sorts of uses for the Apple Watch after they buy it, just as they did with the iPhone. “This will be just like the iPhone: people wanted it and bought for a particular reason, perhaps just browsing, but then found out that they loved it for all sorts of other reasons,” he told The Telegraph.

-- Cook envisions the Apple Watch replacing car keys, particularly the fobs now used for a number of newer vehicles. As The Telegraph notes, such a feature is sure to add fuel to the rumors swirling around Apple’s potential entry into the automotive industry. (The company has reportedly been working on a top-secret project, code-named “Titan,” that aims to churn out an Apple electric car within the next five years.)

-- Health and fitness are key. In addition to a range of health apps, the Apple Watch will monitor your heart rate and notify you every hour that it’s time to stand up and go for a walk.

-- The watch will have a battery life that lasts an entire day. And, it won’t take as long to charge as an iPhone, thanks to what The Telegraph called “special magnet technology” used in the watch’s charger.

-- The new product differs from previous Apple AAPL product rollouts because it’s the first time the company has released something that users have to try on before purchasing. That may lead to Apple “tweaking the experience in the store,” said Cook. The CEO also praised the company’s new retail chief, Angela Ahrendts, left her role as Burberry’s CEO last year to run Apple’s online and retail stores.

]]>http://fortune.com/2015/02/27/tim-cook-apple-watch-car-keys/feed/0Apple Unveils iPhone 6huddlestontomThe key to an $80 billion wearables market? Invisibility.http://fortune.com/2015/02/24/invisible-wearables-market/
http://fortune.com/2015/02/24/invisible-wearables-market/#commentsTue, 24 Feb 2015 11:00:17 +0000http://fortune.com/?p=1003427]]>Several factors have dogged the nascent wearable technology market. The lack of breakthrough innovation around batteries, for one, requiring wearers to plug in on-the-go gadgets more than they’d like. The lack of sophistication around tiny user interfaces is another, though that will no doubt improve over time.

But a big one? The social factor. Beyond the geeks of Silicon Valley and elsewhere, it’s just not cool to wear a watch, glasses, or headset that’s as big as a hood ornament.

That’s going to change, according to Juniper Research. The British market observer believes that the wearable technology market will grow to $80 billion by 2020--and the key will be making the connected gadgets virtually indistinguishable from their disconnected peers.

That means that Apple AAPL must be on to something as it continues to make atypical hires from the fashion and apparel world. Observers, including Fortune‘s own Philip Elmer-Dewitt, believe the new talent will help smooth the rough edges of a technology that’s as personal as a bracelet, watch, or ring. (So, apparently, does Google.) The best wearables, and the ones best positioned for profitability, may be those that allow their technology to completely recede into the background.

Nevertheless, wearables will be a diverse growth market that’s not merely Internet-connected jewelry. Wearables that attach to the skin, such as MC10’s Biostamp, are also part of this category--though they’re in a “more embryonic state” and require a much larger shift in consumer habits than a smart watch, Juniper says.

]]>http://fortune.com/2015/02/24/invisible-wearables-market/feed/0MC10 Biostamp wearable techsoccerrogueMeet Eero: The only home Wi-Fi widget you’ll ever needhttp://fortune.com/2015/02/03/eero-stealth-wifi-internet-things/
http://fortune.com/2015/02/03/eero-stealth-wifi-internet-things/#commentsTue, 03 Feb 2015 15:30:23 +0000http://fortune.com/?p=972440]]>Seated across the table, Nick Weaver wields what appears to be a patch of white porcelain. It’s slightly bulbous, a palm-sized square with rounded edges. Save for a stylized Scandinavian name printed in the lower left-hand corner--”eero”--one might mistake it for a slab cut from a toilet.

In fact, Weaver is unveiling the product of a year’s worth of stealth research and development undertaken by Eero, his 15-person San Francisco-based startup. The unassuming plastic chunk encloses an all-in-one Wi-Fi device: a wireless router, access point, and range extender all rolled into one. He places it gingerly on the tabletop.

What makes Eero’s product different from those already marketed by competitors such as Linksys or Belkin (which acquired Linksys in 2013) is that the devices don’t, according to Weaver, require add-ons (although you’ll need three to cover a typical household). Eero works in tandem to create a wireless mesh network that permeates your home with Internet access. The devices run diagnostics, automatically download security fixes, and send weekly digests about network activity, Weaver says. Should anything go wrong--which is unlikely, he assures--there’s no need to get up and hit “restart.” The device will reboot itself.

Set-up is easy, too: Just plug the first one into your cable or DSL modem and a power source, spread the rest around your living quarters (also near power outlets), and the network can be managed with a mobile application.

Weaver pulls out his phone to show me the status of his in-laws’ home Wi-Fi network back on the West Coast. (Eero has been beta-testing its eponymous devices in 25 San Francisco homes, including Weaver’s own.) At the tap of a screen, he monitors its activity from Fortune‘s offices on the opposite side of the United States. It’s the only home Wi-Fi system you’ll ever need, he’s fond of saying.

The devices are meant to address some of the pain points that afflict home Wi-Fi: dead zones, password management, and yes, that dreaded, stomach-knotting epitaph of many an attempted video stream: “Buffering.” Eliminating dead zones is a cinch, Weaver says, since the system is distributed. Each device covers about 1,000 square feet, and three usually do the trick, he says, turning the Eero over in his hands.

The presence of multiple nodes helps prevent the network from overloading. As more devices connect and as they stream more data, the distributed Eero system keeps any one device from becoming too saturated. (In addition to targeting Internet of Things early adopters, the company hopes to court so-called cord-cutters, people who have ditched cable plans in favor of video streaming services like Netflix and Hulu.)

The Eero device also makes password management simple. People joining the network are split into three groups: “owners,” “users,” and “guests.” Owners have full administrative rights, users can invite guests, and guests solely can access the network. (For slightly more granular control, there is the option to set time limits for network access.) Also, instead of trying to decipher the alphanumeric character hastily jotted down by the installation technician--Seriously, is that a capital “Y” or “4” or some kind of Sumerian logograph?--users can simply be added through the accompanying Eero app. For anyone who wants to join the network who doesn’t have the app, an owner can easily text them the password.

“I grew up setting up these networks in Chicago,” Weaver says, reminiscing about a job he had around his neighborhood as a boy. Later at Stanford University, he took the reins again as a network administrator. That’s where he met his company’s co-founders, Amos Schallich and Nate Hardison.

Last January, the startup raised $4 million in funding from First Round Capital, Menlo Ventures (Weaver’s former firm), Stanford-affiliated StartX, AME Cloud Ventures, Homebrew Ventures, and individuals like Alexis Ohanian, Gary Tan, and Trae Vassallo. Today the company leaves “stealth mode” with plans to sell each device for $125 (or $300 for a 3-pack) and ship them in early summer.

“We spent a lot of time on the software piece, adding intelligence to the network,” Weaver says. His team spent an equal amount of time on the design. They wanted to create an item--a piece of industrial art--people would be proud to have on display. To make the devices beautiful, the startup enlisted one of today’s top design minds, Fred Bould, whose projects include the GoPro Hero 3 and the Nest thermostat.

Eero’s design is more than just for show. There is a commercial interest in looking pretty. When consumers prominently display the devices in their homes, they can potentially get better performance out of them. Further, the company hopes to tap into that social phenomenon--the network effect--that helps new products catch on. In a perfect scenario, people see Eero devices at their friend’s and family’s places, want them, and go out and buy them, too.

Since most Wi-Fi devices get buried, hidden from view, or stashed in closets--there is an “aesthetic hurdle you have to mount,” Weaver says, passing the tile in my direction. The company and product’s name is a reference to Eero Saarinen, designer of St. Louis’ signature Gateway Arch and master of sweeping architectural forms. (He also designed the Bell Labs headquarters.)

Inspecting the slab, I still think it’s unlikely that people will start decorating their domiciles with routers--even Eero’s charmingly paunchy all-in-one routers. But there is something to be said for the company’s ambition. For many homes, Wi-Fi has become the de facto gateway to the wider world. Eero offers slices of that sphere.

]]>http://fortune.com/2015/02/03/eero-stealth-wifi-internet-things/feed/0Eero Wi-Fi router, access point, range extenderrhhackettfortuneAfter 94 years, RadioShack may be about to pull the plughttp://fortune.com/2015/02/02/radio-shack-bankruptcy-sell-stores-sprint/
http://fortune.com/2015/02/02/radio-shack-bankruptcy-sell-stores-sprint/#commentsMon, 02 Feb 2015 20:37:37 +0000http://fortune.com/?p=972191]]>Troubled electronics retailer RadioShack is reportedly close to filing for bankruptcy and is in talks to sell half of its more than 4,000 stores to Sprint while shuttering its remaining locations.

That’s according to Bloomberg, which cites anonymous sources in reporting that the Fort Worth, Texas-based retailer is close to a deal that would see the RadioShack RSH locations sold to Sprint S operated under the wireless carrier’s name. Under those terms, the deal would represent the end of RadioShack’s existence as a stand-alone retailer once the rest of its locations are closed. The deal is not yet finalized and could still fall apart, or the two companies could agree on a co-branding arrangement, Bloomberg’s report noted.

The online retailer is thinking about using the defunct RadioShack stores as showcases for its hardware, as well as potential pickup and drop-off centers for online customers, the report said.

The New York Stock Exchange said late Monday that it would delist Radio Shack’s shares. The company has fallen below the required threshold of a $50 million market capitalization or an equal amount of shareholder equity for 30 consecutive trading days. The exchange said that Radio Shack does not intend to submit a business plan to address the problem.

In January, The Wall Street Journal reported that the 94-year-old RadioShack was preparing to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection by February after reporting losses in each of the last 11 quarters. The chain reported worse-than-expected losses in September and required help from hedge fund Standard General, which led a financing that helped RadioShack continue operating through the holiday season.

Now, The Journal reports that Standard General, which became RadioShack’s biggest shareholder last year, is in talks to be the lead bidder in the troubled chain’s potential bankruptcy auction. The Journal cites anonymous sources in reporting that Standard General could become the so-called stalking horse, or the first bidder, in a court-supervised auction of RadioShack’s assets. The hedge fund could also potentially purchase a slimmed-down RadioShack that has fewer stores, the paper said.

RadioShack’s stock fell during Monday’s trading session and is down nearly 90% in the past year.

--Reuters contributed to this report.

]]>http://fortune.com/2015/02/02/radio-shack-bankruptcy-sell-stores-sprint/feed/0Earlier this year RadioShack defaulted on its debt and filed for bankruptcy.huddlestontomShe’s an inventor. She’s 25. And she wants to make true wireless charging a realityhttp://fortune.com/2014/12/30/meredith-perry-ubeam/
http://fortune.com/2014/12/30/meredith-perry-ubeam/#commentsTue, 30 Dec 2014 14:57:08 +0000http://fortune.com/?p=913583]]>Meredith Perry is tired of wires.

The 25-year-old was still an undergrad at the University of Pennsylvania when she built the first model of her wireless charging system and demonstrated it at the All Things Digital conference in 2011. (“It was basically like two toaster-sized boxes that were two feet apart, and we showed that you could beam a certain amount of power over that distance with ultrasound,” she says.) Its name? uBeam.

Now a company in its own right, uBeam says it has a working prototype and could have a product on store shelves within two years. There are other wireless charging systems already out there--Qi, for example, charges your phone as long as it sits on or inches away from a small base--but Perry believes uBeam’s technology is superior to all competitors. As part of the Shape the Future package in the January 2015 issue of Fortune, Perry, who lives in Los Angeles, sat down for a long conversation by phone about how she created uBeam and her vision of other future technologies. What follows is an edited transcript.

Fortune: Let’s go to a few years ago when you were first beginning to work on uBeam. What was the invention process like?

Meredith Perry: To create something really new is extremely difficult, because there's no protocol. I can't Google it online and find, “These are the steps that need to be taken,” or, “When somebody created something similar, these are the questions they asked, these are the people they talked to, and these are the materials they used.” Sometimes you have to create your own materials, your own design, your own manufacturing process. You have to create your own shipping materials that can cover the parts that you built. And we were building all of these tiny little devices by hand. We 3-D-printed tools that were useful in creating these devices. For example, we needed a holder that could hold a certain amount of micro beads. So that’s the level of minutiae you have to get involved with in order to actually execute on something that hasn't been done before.

In the beginning I looked at every possible option. I just wanted to solve a problem. And that was: I don’t want to plug in my laptop anymore. I want to be able to move around a room and use all my devices without plugging them in. And I learned that ultrasound was the only type of technology that would work for the experience we are trying to give, which is the Wi-Fi for charging.

Then I basically stopped at what materials we needed to make that happen--they're called transducers, which convert electrical energy into sound and sound back into electricity. I knew that for this project to work, I needed the right transducer, and a transmitter that needs to have this amount of power and be able to beam that power across the room and hit these targets, and so on.

And that existed already?

Yes, transducers are used in speakers. And that's effectively what uBeam is: a speaker. To make sound, in general you plug in a speaker, which is a bunch of sonic transducers. And we're using ultrasonic transducers, which is sound above what you can hear. So when you plug in a speaker, you're taking electricity from a wall, and the electricity is converted into sound, and that sound travels through the air. You're converting electrical energy into acoustic energy. So that already exists. But a speaker is radiating out sound in 360 degrees, and you're not going to get that much power from sound unless you focus it. So you have to do the same thing you would do with a laser beam, or with a light bulb--you take the energy and funnel it into a cone. But we're not physically focusing it, we're digitally focusing it. So we had to create a transmitter that digitally focuses sound to get enough power out of our ultrasonic speaker across the room. So the whole concept of uBeam worked because I knew that transducers existed. It was just a matter of thinking about sound as a form of energy, which people don't often think about.

Anyway. I'm kind of going into weird details about this.

No, it’s fascinating. Let’s talk more about the general process. What was your work method?

Well, back in 2012, we had raised a bunch of money, I had this whole plan planned out, but it was extremely difficult because I was working with only contractors. Up until a few months ago, even. Until we raised our Series A [funding round, totaling $10 million and led by Upfront Ventures] we didn't have any full-time employees except me. So what I did was broke apart the technology into its pieces. I had people working on the transmitter, and there are the electronics behind the transmitter, so I contracted people to create the electronics behind the transmitter. Then I did tons and tons of research to figure out, “What is the most powerful, in-air, ultrasonic transducer I can get?” There are a zillion different types of ultrasonic transducers. Most are made for medical purposes, like sonograms. Then there are people that have designed transducers for cars, like when you back up and you hear the “beep beep.” Then there are transducers you use underwater for sonar, like on a submarine. I needed to figure out which is the best transducer I can use that will beam power through the air. And of course, nothing had been created before that was even close.

There was one type of transducer that came out of a university, and it was kind of close, all we had to do was change this, this, and this, and theoretically we should be able to output the power we need using this design… so I contracted the people that wrote those papers to design those transducers. Then I needed someone to design the transmitter transducer, but I also needed someone else to design the receiver transducer, which would capture the energy. So I had individual people working on individual parts of the system.

It sounds almost like an assembly line.

Right. But it was very difficult because everybody was remote. That was the challenge of the way I set it up. But I could not get anyone to come on full-time. And I didn’t necessarily need anyone to come on full-time, I just needed each person to finish their one part.

The part we couldn’t crack was the transducer. It took us a total of 14 months working on that one particular problem.

But that one part is the core engine, isn’t it?

Well, for a system to function each part needs to work, but ultimately this piece is the heartbeat, yes.

So then it makes sense that the transducer took the longest.

Yes, but I didn’t realize just how hard it would be.

Had no one ever tried wireless charging before?

Wireless charging as a category absolutely has been tried before and is being done by multiple parties using different technologies. But in terms of ultrasonic power, no. Anything that can be beamed through the air can be converted into a usable type of energy. So, people have tried laser for wireless power, but lasers can blind you. And then there’s [Duracell] Powermat, which uses induction and is magnetic, so you stick your phone on a mat and it charges. I don’t consider that true wireless power. Then with magnetic resonance coupling, which a company called WiTricity is using, it’s a totally viable technology but it’s only effective in charging really large objects over really short distances. If you want to charge something that way at a greater distance, you need receivers that are larger than the device you’re charging, so there’s a convenience issue.

So at the end of the day, ultrasound is the only technology that is safe, that can travel the distance, that can charge your device, while remaining small and compact. Ultrasonic is the only type of energy that can be commercialized for consumer devices.

Well, with one hurdle being that it doesn’t work through walls, like Wi-Fi does.

Well, it’s not necessarily a hurdle if you look at the positives. It’s what makes ultrasound the most secure data transmission system in existence.

But, pie-in-the-sky hope, you’d want it to work through walls, right?

Oh, of course. But it’s physically impossible. If it were possible, I would take that over the secure data transmission. But even working in one room, think about where that can be applied. Not only within homes and rooms, but think about airports, conference halls, concerts. And you can charge an arbitrary number of devices at any time.

You first raised big funding when uBeam was in really early stages. Did you feel a lot of pressure and urgency?

There was a sense of insane urgency throughout the entire process. And I pushed and pushed and pushed, but you can only push so hard. I had set myself an artificial deadline, and I was continuously disappointed that I wasn’t hitting that. But in speaking with people who had created new technologies before, they would say, “Holy crap, you did that in two years? That’s incredibly short.” In my mind, we were like dinosaurs already, but people who have actually experienced creating new technology before said this was actually pretty fast. But the process killed me. People would check in and ask our progress, but to explain what was actually taking so long would take hours.

Was that frustrating?

Of course. And the other thing is that throughout the process, I always thought, “Okay, it’s going to work in three months. We’ve got this great new idea to make this transducer function.” So instead of giving someone an update I’d say I’ll tell you in one month. But then we’d fail, and then we’d say we will make a certain change, and then it will work, and that happened about five times. It took about three months to make each change. It was extraordinarily expensive every single time we wanted to make a change to the device. And the lag time was mind-boggling. When you fail five times but you take tiny steps forward each time, it keeps you going. You can stay positive because there’s still light at the end of the tunnel. But at the same time, it really wears you down. You constantly have to think, “Okay, so if this next option doesn’t work, what will we do?” And you just can’t stop until you accomplish your goal. What really kept me going through the entire process was, “Even though this is so hard, it’s still possible.” And I knew that if it was still possible, I had to do it, because it would be so huge. I know that if I was working on something smaller, or something that I didn’t believe could make such an impact on the world then I wouldn’t have been able to keep going through those times.

So one of our contractors we brought on, who is is now our CTO, created an entirely new type of transducer during our 14-month marathon of death-- it ended up working on the first try. We were running out of money. We had two designs running in parallel, and we knew one of them had to work or we’d be screwed. In the end, both designs worked, but his was so much cheaper and so much more powerful that we went with his.

Take me to the moment when the prototype worked successfully, if there was one big moment.

It was when our CTO's transducer worked. To paint the picture of what life was like at that time: for six and a half months, from December 2013 through June 2014, I was basically living in the tiny garage of my CTO in northern Virginia. It was the worst winter of my entire life, and we spent 10 hours a day just like little Foxconn workers in this garage with no windows, breathing in toxic fumes and trying to get this thing to work over and over and over again.

It was either in April or May when we tested out the hybrid, it worked, and I literally screamed for joy. I had the biggest smile on my face because I knew that the future was bright. We knew it was real, it's going to work, we proved the last piece that we needed to prove.

And now we all just wait for it to come out.

Yes. Most of the world still doesn’t know about this, which is awesome. So we’re going to release it when we release it, and it’ll be something completely new, and I think that the world will be delighted by the experience.

Looking toward the future, what are some of other existing or eventual technologies that excite and interest you?

There are a few. And I’ll try to be quick because I get a little too excited. They span between health and transportation and 3-D holograms. So, last year I got really into the idea of creating 3-D, touchable holograms in the air using fog. I wanted to create a system where you could be sitting next to somebody who is in China but could actually touch them, see them, feel them. I built a bunch of hologram machines, which was cool.

Is this different from the Tupac hologram at Coachella in 2012?

Yeah. This would actually be a three-dimensional display, not just a projection. That’s one thing, the other is I think that people should have some kind of embedded blood sensor that reads your levels continuously. To me, it’s kind of crazy that only once people feel really crappy, they go to a doctor and find out what’s wrong with them. Why don’t we have some sensor built into the body that lets you know before you feel ill, and ultimately, is connected to an embedded dispensary that can put sugar into your body if your glucose is low? You basically would have an external, but embedded, automatic system that regulates your body.

This sound like the first step in making us all half-robot, though…

Right! Yes. What I think is crazy is we have so much data and insight into our digital world, but we have no insight into what’s actually going on inside the most important system of all, our bodies. And then, finally, curing cancer is a big one. If it’s not curable, we need to make MRI machines that detect lumps and growths much smaller than what they can detect right now. Part of the reason we detect cancer at stages where it’s a little too late is that the machines that detect cancer can only see lumps of a certain size. If we were able to detect cancerous growths at a size smaller, we could stop it earlier on. So instead of curing it maybe what we need to do is use machines to catch it much earlier.

Many of these ideas you like--wouldn’t they scare most people? Its all very Isaac Asimov.

I’ve thought about how to implement this. Speaking for myself, I never want to go to the dentist, I never want to go to the various doctors. So if someone told me to implant something in my body, as a futurist, I’d be down, but as a citizen I would think it is annoying. And maybe scary. So I think it’s something that needs to be done when you’re super young with the guidance of a pediatrician. We could just get in the habit of, once you’re born, when you’re two years old or something, you get this thing implanted and you grow up with it and it becomes part of your life. People are just scared of things that they’re not used to.

What you need to know: RadioShack, which is in the midst of a high-profile tussle with loan providers, reported a 13% slump in same-store sales for the latest quarter, a decline that was mostly due to weakness in the postpaid mobility business. RadioShack attempted to strike a bullish tone by pointing out that the “retail segment,” the half of its business that isn’t mobility, has performed better in the third quarter and during the key Thanksgiving holiday weekend. But it is still troubling that RadioShack posted a double-digit drop in overall same-store sales, especially after larger rival Best Buy BBY recently reported a surprise 2.2% increase in U.S. same-store sales for its latest quarter.

The big number: RadioShack’s quarterly loss swelled to $161.1 million from a loss of $135.9 million a year ago. The company’s total liabilities are at $1.39 billion with total assets of just $1.2 billion (as of February of this year, the retailer had slightly more assets than liabilities). Fitch Ratings on Thursday said that RadioShack’s five-year credit-default swaps have reached their widest levels ever, and said “mounting market concern for RadioShack comes amid speculation over whether a failure to pay credit event has occurred.”

What you might have missed: RadioShack has been in trouble for quite some time, as it is on pace to report its third consecutive annual loss as the seller of mobile devices, accessories and other consumer electronics faces steep competition from larger rivals that sell the same products but typically with a wider selection. RadioShack CEO Joseph Magnacca on Thursday promised cost-cutting efforts that would boost earnings “by over $400 million annually,” including efforts to trim expenses at the company’s headquarters as well as close some locations. While cost-cutting is important, it is also interesting to note that RadioShack’s net loss for the first nine months of the current fiscal year already totaled nearly $400 million, and Wall Street analysts expect the company to lose more than $100 million in the key fourth quarter.

RadioShack is also finding itself distracted by an argument about the terms of a $250 million loan that was provided by Cerberus Capital Management and Harbinger Group. Magnacca earlier this month said that the lenders “have repeatedly blocked our efforts to accelerate and intensify our turnaround and make smart decisions for our business.” One area of contention: RadioShack has repeatedly requested that the lenders sign off on the closure of up to 1,100 stores, but hasn’t yet won approval for that move.

]]>http://fortune.com/2014/12/11/radioshack-sales-tumble/feed/0476653109johnnerkellSmart speaker Cone gets radio play with new retail, e-commerce partnershttp://fortune.com/2014/11/20/aether-cone/
http://fortune.com/2014/11/20/aether-cone/#commentsThu, 20 Nov 2014 13:00:45 +0000http://fortune.com/?p=874605]]>Aether's Cone, an impressively sleek smart speaker, has been a chart-topping hit since it was unveiled earlier this year. The lightweight metal cornucopia of sound works with partners like music streaming service Rdio and National Public Radio to offer a wide range of music and news on demand. It accepts voice-recognition requests powered by Nuance and interfaces with a free iOS app that allows users to change the song or volume from across the room. Until recently, Cone was only available through Aether.com and required a $9.99 Rdio Unlimited subscription.

This week, the three-pound speaker, previously available only in black and copper, arrives in an Apple-esque white and silver. Cone begins shipping via Amazon.com AMZN, and will be on the shelves in Selfridges in London. The next generation Cone will sell and ship with a free, ad-supported Rdio account, a compromise that will somewhat limit a user's ability skip between songs and genres. But it makes Cone the only smart speaker to come bundled with 30 million preloaded songs. (Cone users can still pay for a full Rdio account to continue bypassing unwanted ads and songs.) There will also be a web-based setup for non-iOS users.

Visually speaking, Cone is more Design Within Reach than Best Buy. It's also costlier than many competitors, retailing for $399 compared to Bose's $299.95 SoundLink, a $199 Beats Pill, or $149 for Jawbone's full-size Jambox. If anything, Cone's closest competitor is Bang and Olufsen's sleek Beolit 12, recently reduced to $599. Amazon's forthcoming Echo, equipped with Siri-like speech recognition that answers questions and recites information like the weather forecast, will cost $199 (or, for a limited time, $99 for Amazon Prime members). But no word on when the Echo, currently available for pre-order by invite only, will actually go on sale.

Cone, originally a stealth enterprise called The Morse Project, was several years in the making, but not just in terms of its obvious visual beauty. The unseen allure is in its programming, built on exhaustive research in the homes of friends and family, says Aether co-founder and chief product officer Duncan Lamb, a product designer who formerly worked at Skype and Nokia. His co-founder, Danish entrepreneur Janus Friis, previously co-founded a number of companies including Skype, Rdio, and the early music file-sharing service KaZaa

The needle-drop moment came in a friend's home, where the Aether crew spotted a Tivoli radio on kitchen table with an expensive B&O speaker nearby. But it wasn't the high-end hi-fi that the family used. They relied almost exclusively on the cheaper radio. "They could just click it on, something would play, and it generally wouldn't suck," says Lamb. His team understood they should pursue both design and functionality that would offer users the path of least resistance.

Cone works out of the box, meaning that time--that is, patience for Cone to learn your preferences--is the only barrier to entry. To skip a song, turn the dial around the face of the speaker. To change genres, give the dial a more forceful spin. "The spin allows you to teach the system in a gentle way," Lamb says, noting that Cone will train over time and fewer spins should be needed. When I cued up Rodriguez or Gram Parsons often enough, Cone started selecting Cat Stevens, The Band, and tracks from Richard and Linda Thompson's I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight.

If consumers get anything wrong, Lamb says, it's thinking that Cone is just another battery-powered portable speaker to carry to the kitchen or out to the patio. "It's cumbersome to say it's a thinking music player, but I'm almost pedantic about not wanting to call it a speaker," he admits. "But it's very important we make that distinction and consider that [Cone] learns, adapts, and evolves. A speaker is a slave to your phone. Personally, I don't want to be a slave to my phone. I want to be doing other things, not digging out an app three screens away."

Lamb says there's some ambition and intent to expand the Aether product line to other smart, sleek devices or appliances. But the main focus is making Cone a success, both for this holiday season and hopefully well beyond. "We run around like an 8-year-old playing soccer, we'll screw it up," he says.

Lay down a smooth demo track, though, and the possibilities for remixes could be endless.

]]>http://fortune.com/2014/11/20/aether-cone/feed/007-reading_nook_alt-retouched_v2_RGB_uprezfortuneheatherSamsung and the curious case of the red OLEDhttp://fortune.com/2014/11/13/samsung-oled-display-tech/
http://fortune.com/2014/11/13/samsung-oled-display-tech/#commentsThu, 13 Nov 2014 16:57:12 +0000http://fortune.com/?p=771969]]>When critics of Samsung see the Korean technology mega-corporation turn out yet another huge, impressively sharp screen for a new phone or tablet computer, it makes them see red.

Well, not red, actually--more like a super-saturated, unrealistically bright version of red.

Samsung is the near-undisputed king of OLED, or organic light-emitting diode, display technology. It has been using its dominant position in that market as a source of stability as it enters an increasingly untenable situation: eroding sales on both ends of the phone price spectrum. On the low end where profit margins are thin, Samsung has been under attack by local manufacturers such as Xiaomi, which have been willing to sacrifice profit for the sake of market share. On the high end where margins are better, rivals such as Apple’s iPhone have proved to be fiercely competitive. Every company in the business hopes that large sales volumes will make their big bets pay off in the end; the question is what will prompt consumers to buy one glassy device over another.

Samsung hopes that display technology will be one of those things as its rivals use less flashy but more trusted screen technology.

Apple’s iPhones and iPads and roughly two-thirds of all smartphones have LCD, or liquid-crystal display, screens. LCDs essentially twist and untwist liquid crystals to allow a certain amount of light through each red, green, or blue sub-pixel, the term for the components that make up each individual pixel in a display. The technology is well-known and well-worn, but it comes with a major downside: liquid crystals provide no light of their own. The necessary backlight that accompanies such displays is a substantial draw on battery life; taken together with the crystals and other necessary technology, such displays make the resulting screen thicker and more rigid.

Most of Samsung’s modern devices have AMOLED (as in “active-matrix organic light-emitting diode”) displays. The technology involves passing a current through tiny, thin films of organic material (red, green, or blue), which cause them to throw off colored light. AMOLED screens generate their own light, so they do not need a backlight. Even better, when the pixels are not needed, they are actually “off,” saving device power and allowing blacks to be deeper and truer than with LCDs. Manufacturing and material improvements have made AMOLED displays thinner, extremely pixel-dense, occasionally curved, and able to display a huge range of colors.

Most importantly, these manufacturing improvements come largely from one single maker: Samsung Display, a division of Samsung Electronics. “There may be a couple of other players, technically, but, really, these displays come from Samsung,” says Vinita Jakhanwal, senior director of analyst firm IHS. “There is no other OLED or AMOLED maker making displays for mobile phones or tablets.”

Samsung certainly wants to talk about its display technology. In a video promotion for its Galaxy Tab S tablet this summer, women purchase salad bowls, dresses, and shoes online, only to sigh in deep exasperation when a different shade of blue-green, yellow, or shale comes out of the box. The Galaxy Tab S, the voice-over claims, displays the “professional RGB standard” and each pixel is a “living pixel, capable of producing a variety of color combinations.” The message: Samsung’s screens are organic, different, and simply better at colors.

In reality, this is the opposite of what many industry pundits claim. The colors displayed on Samsung’s Galaxy Tab S, according to Dieter Bohn, an editor for the tech-lifestyle website The Verge, “still tend to look over-saturated to my eyes,” though he added that “Samsung has toned things down considerably from years past.” In an otherwise positive review of a newer Galaxy S5 smartphone model, Anandtech, a computer hardware site, made note of “minor issues with excessive green in the color balance.” In essence, people seem to agree that the colors of AMOLED displays are more vivid. Whether or not those colors are natural or accurate based on what the eye would see in real life is another matter entirely.

Samsung may be sensitive to accusations of color problems because one of its main rivals is on record about it. Apple CEO Tim Cook told a Goldman Sachs investors’ conference in February 2013 that “the color saturation is awful” on OLED displays. He added: “If you ever buy anything online and you want to really know what the color is . . . you should really think twice before you depend on the color of the OLED display.”

Part of the issue has to do with a seeming strength of AMOLED technology. It can create a wider range of colors than other display technologies. While the colors of most images are limited to fit inside the 18-year-old sRGB color gamut, AMOLED screens can technically reach far beyond that range, and Samsung often lets them. Some Samsung devices offer a display-correcting “mode”-- “Professional Photo” is one--but for the most part, Samsung allows colors to run bolder and more saturated, especially in the red part of the visible spectrum.

“The colors look really off to me, but it’s up to you whether you like this effect or not,” says Erica Griffin, an in-depth video device reviewer, in her take on Samsung’s Galaxy S5. “I know Samsung is heading for an effect that’s eye-catching, to get people’s attention . . . For some people, that looks pretty, and for others it’s just an eyesore.”

It’s also a look that may change as you use your device. The organic materials used to make blues in OLED displays wear out far more quickly than the reds or greens. As they start to wear out, the overall balance of color shifts. Samsung and other device makers often try to correct for this--for example, by making blue sub-pixels twice as large--but it remains an unsolved issue.

A Samsung spokesperson pointed to the company’s latest displays, dubbed Quad-HD Super AMOLED, as having “an immersive viewing experience with a high contrast ratio and a wider color range” than the competition. The Galaxy Tab S featured in the aforementioned ad has a dedicated chip in it that can stabilize colors. At its most basic setting, tech site Anandtech says it mostly has the desired effect.

Colors are important on mobile devices for one overarching reason: managed expectations. Knowing that Twitter uses a sky blue color for its logo, it can be jarring for users and marketers alike to see a version with a tinge of green. LCD display technology certainly is not standing still--displays are becoming thinner, brighter, and even more high-definition. But IHS’s Jakhanwal notes that it is more than just colors, battery life, or thinness that gets a device into buyers’ hands.

“The winners are going to be the device that has not just superior display technology, but superior overall performance,” she says. “Nobody is really going to feel good that, ‘Now I have the brightest tablet,’ or ‘Now my colors are more real.’ It’s a combination of features that make the display and the device.” Which may be good reason for Samsung and its market-moving AMOLED research teams more time to move its displays out of the red.

Next, read: “Logged In,” Fortune’s personal technology column, written by Jason Cipriani and published every Tuesday.

]]>http://fortune.com/2014/11/13/samsung-oled-display-tech/feed/0452962102soccerrogueIs it finally time to cut cable?http://fortune.com/2014/10/21/cable-tv-cut/
http://fortune.com/2014/10/21/cable-tv-cut/#commentsTue, 21 Oct 2014 16:11:35 +0000http://fortune.com/?p=829646]]>About three years ago, my wife and I made one of the most difficult decisions we've made in our eight years of marriage. Over the course of a few months we held several debates, penned numerous drafts of a pros and cons list, and scribbled a half-baked Venn diagram in effort to make a decision. Then one morning, we decided to quit giving it so much thought, and we did it, we drove to the local Comcast CMCSA office and turned in our cable box. We cut the cord.

Why all the fuss? We were comfortable with cable. We knew what we wanted to watch, and when to tune in. I had access to my favorite sports channel, the kids had fallen in love with various characters on the Disney Channel DIS, and my wife had The Food Network.

Yet we felt like we were being taken advantage of. We paid for 160 channels, but we really only watched shows on 20 of them at most. (Yes, I’m aware of how the cable TV industry’s bundling business model works. Still doesn’t erase the feeling.) By cutting cable out of our monthly bills, we figured we would save roughly $60 per month. Sure, we still pay Comcast for our Internet service, but it’s a service we value and thus don't mind paying for (when it works, but that's for another column).

We filled the void left by cable with an Apple TV AAPL and a subscription to Netflix NFLX. We found new shows to watch, and if we couldn't find what we were looking for, we just didn't watch TV. Our kids, who are far more adaptable than we give them credit for, learned to love new characters and new cartoons. The first few weeks of transition were a little rough, but quicker than I had expected, we all settled into a new routine.

Our setup has evolved over the years; primarily by adding more streaming services to our repertoire. We now subscribe to Hulu Plus, Amazon Instant VideoAMZN, and yes, we use a relative's HBO Go account TWX to watch Game of Thrones.

Unfortunately, there's still one hiccup in our setup I've yet to find a solution for: sports. This single category remains--frustratingly--a giant stop sign for those looking to cancel cable.

National Football League games aren't a huge issue, as most games are televised on major networks over-the-air. Those who subscribe to a variation of NFL Red Zone, the league’s multi-game simulcast, will find cutting cable to be impossible. For my family, we suffer from blackout restrictions when it comes to watching the Colorado Avalanche through the NHL's Game Center Live streaming service. I'm hopeful the FCC's elimination of blackout rules will provide some relief in this area of my post-cable life.

I talked to Kai Armstrong, a fellow cable refugee, to find out how he and his family get by without a cable subscription. Like myself, Kai uses an Apple TV with a Netflix subscription for the majority of streaming access. Over-the-air programming provides access to college football and Nascar.

Unlike me, Kai uses a service called Plex to stream locally stored media from his computer to his TV, tablet or smartphone. Instead of relying solely on the iTunes catalog, Plex accepts content from nearly any source. The core service is free, takes little setup, and can be used with streaming boxes such as Roku, Fire TV, Xbox, and Google’s Chromecast GOOG.

When I asked him what the biggest challenge was for his family (he’s married with a toddler) to make the switch, he said, "The option of turning on the TV and watching whatever's on just to occupy time no longer exists." But when I pressed him if, at the end of the day, this was a challenge or an unexpected benefit, he conceded: "We spend more time as a family now, instead of staring at a screen."

On one hand, it makes sense to find yourself watching less TV once you've canceled your cable subscription. On the other, with seemingly endless catalogs of content at your fingertips ready to play on demand, self control is required.

The number of subscribers ditching cable service is on the rise--hundreds of thousands ditch it every quarter--and with recent announcements from HBO, CBSCBS, and Lions GateLGF to offer stand-alone streaming plans, the movement is gaining more momentum. But there's still work to be done.

Kane Hamilton is someone I was positive would be living in a post-cable world, yet when I inquired about his setup, I was surprised to hear he had yet to make the switch. When I asked him why, he said, "[It's] something we would love to consider but just a battle we have chosen not to fight yet." And it's not for lack of trying or a streaming setup, as the Hamilton's frequently stream Netflix, HBO, ESPN, and another half-dozen services.

To him, the "battle" of cutting the cord is attributed to a lack of knowledge surrounding how his family would access content, the quality of streams, and the absence of sporting events. But I can't help but look at the amount of content he streams and think he already knows the answer to most of his concerns; the comfort level the TV guide provides is just too much to walk away from, no matter the cost.

"Logged In" is Fortune's personal technology column, written by Jason Cipriani. Read it on Fortune.com each Tuesday.

]]>http://fortune.com/2014/10/21/cable-tv-cut/feed/0Human hand holding remote controlsoccerrogueThe next big battery disruption isn’t coming next yearhttp://fortune.com/2014/08/15/the-next-big-battery-disruption-isnt-coming-next-year/
http://fortune.com/2014/08/15/the-next-big-battery-disruption-isnt-coming-next-year/#commentsFri, 15 Aug 2014 19:57:01 +0000http://fortune.com/?p=742726]]>If you were to track the upgrades for your Apple iPhone or Toyota Prius from their introduction to today, you will see a familiar arc in the technology industry: performance multiplies, the product is refined, jobs are created, even entire industries are reworked.

Consider, for example, that the iPhone’s theoretical maximum download speed on cellular networks went from 1 megabyte per second for the 2007 “2G” iPhone to 300 mbps for today’s 5s model. Its display more than doubled in pixel density, its camera transformed from cheap afterthought to serious photography tool, and its software capabilities are far more robust than when the device was introduced. (Even the App Store is a second-generation feature.)

Similarly, Toyota’s Prius hybrid car evolved from a neighborhood oddity (and celebrity eco-accessory) in 2000 to a best-selling vehicle in Japan and California. The engine in today’s model is 20 percent lighter (and offers 20 percent more total horsepower) than the original. Its distance-per-charge is longer. Without the Prius, it can be argued, there would be no Tesla.

There’s is one component of all of these things that hasn’t changed in that time period: the lithium-ion battery. Whether in the iPhone, the Prius, and even the Tesla Model S, the Li-ion battery is essentially made of the same stuff as those first introduced by Sony in 1991. That’s not to say that innovation hasn’t happened around them, of course. Device-makers have become better at charging them, cooling them, and controlling how much power they draw into our phones, cars, laptops, and USB gadgets. But they’re still largely the same battery. Even Tesla’s $5 billion plans for a “giga”-sized battery factory involve the manufacture of--you guessed it--lithium-ion packs.

Upon further investigation, there is little consensus on what kind of battery technology may replace lithium ion. There aren’t even rumors.

To find out why, Fortune posed a simple question to five established researchers working on next-generation batteries, a behavioral economist, and a battery industry executive: Why is battery technology moving so much slower than hardware?

As you’ll soon find out, the answer is one part chemistry, one part psychology, and two parts the answer to a counter-question: Who really wants to be the first to drive with a new type of battery that hasn’t benefited from two decades of development?

Today’s battery tech: dense, hot, tricky

Lithium-ion battery technology is in many ways the workhorse of portable power.

Lithium’s atomic number is three, which, if you remember middle-school chemistry, means that it has three protons, is very lightweight, and can be packed more densely than any element other than hydrogen or helium. Lithium is a known quantity to chemists, says Carlo Segre, professor of physics at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago, and we mostly understand how it flows inside a battery.

“I think it really boils down to, the reason lithium is so good, is that it’s very light, and you can get it through a membrane very easily,” Segre says. “And the potential difference (voltage) you can generate is one of the highest we know.”

It’s not just lithium that goes into a Li-ion battery. The element gets mixed with magnesium (for personal gadgets and vehicles), iron phosphate (for heavy-duty work), and other metals. That mixture flows into another material to create voltage: graphite, titanium solutions, silicon, and different forms of carbon, depending. In most non-industrial devices used in relatively safe conditions, you have lithium manganese oxide flowing into graphite, because those materials are cheap, relatively safe, and dense.

But there are quite a few problems with the old faithful. The process generates heat in a dense space, requiring some kind of cooling system. (A tremendous amount of work went into Tesla’s car-length liquid cooling rig, for example.) The electrolyte that conducts lithium’s flow adds weight. The cells lose their capacity over time. Charging the battery, which makes the lithium flow back, could be quicker. And though it’s rare, we have seen that tightly packed batteries full of fluids, made very hot, can sometimes puncture or explode.

What we might use next: air

Chandrasekhar “Spike” Narayan, director of science and technology at IBM Research, is part of the Battery 500 Project. The goal is to get batteries to power a car of average cost on a 500-mile trip. IBM IBM won’t build the batteries itself, but will partner with manufacturing and consumer companies to get them into the wild.

After years of work, Narayan sees a future for lithium-air technology, which replaces graphite and other metals with oxygen, refreshed by the car itself. Such batteries could be lighter, safer, and last far longer. But working with new mixtures, pushing them into new materials, and seeing how safe they are over thousands of charge cycles takes a very, very long time.

“There is no guiding principle that suggests you get improvement from year to year,” Narayan says. “There is no magic knob you can turn. The only way we can get to that kind of paradigm is a completely new kind of chemistry, and innovation doesn’t work like that.”

Currently, lithium-air batteries have to overcome problems with blockages, internal rust, and stability. Even if air batteries are smoothed into a viable product, Narayan sees a future where battery technology is no longer one-size-fits all. “It may not be a great technology for power grid storage, for example. Especially when there is a size requirement, we may see differentiation among battery types soon.”

What we can do in the meantime: get cheaper

Kevin Bai and Xuan “Joe” Zhou at Kettering University work in labs and in battery industry research, but they talk like car shoppers than laboratory wonks. With the hybrid vehicles of today, Zhou notes, there are lots of trade-offs, in several ways.

“Right now [hybrid] batteries are selling for $500 to $600 per kilowatt hour, but they should be $200,” Zhou says. “And every dollar you spend in the battery is another dollar in cooling. If the car needs a $6,000 battery, it’s a $6,000 cooling system.” What’s more, Bai notes, the size of such a battery eats up trunk or seating space. The scientists agree that an electric vehicle should feel like less of a financial albatross.

But it’s anybody’s guess as to which current materials may work out to have the safest, coolest, and most lightweight mix, while still selling for less than today’s offerings.

Zinc-air batteries, used in hearing aids today, are seeing renewed interest, especially given zinc’s easy availability. The same goes for sodium-air, which are cheaper and easier to assemble, if not as potentially powerful as lithium-air. There are also attempts to replace the graphite and carbon solids in batteries with silicon, though silicon isn’t cheap. Or we might just improve the cost and performance of the lithium-iron batteries in our drills and motorcycles in the meantime.

In many ways, Bai says, building larger battery plants, better battery management tools, and a smarter power grid for charging is going to bear greater fruit than waiting on one or another chemical combo to pay off.

“We are actually very far away from a brand-new battery for vehicles,” Bai says. “The automotive industry, they must feel they can stand behind 10 years of testing before they are comfortable trying a new material.” It will be at least 2020, he says, before you see zinc-air batteries in the first four-wheeled vehicles-and then a long while more before that battery technology matures.

What we can do in the future: nano-engineer materials

Don’t give up on lithium-ion just yet, says Partha Mukherjee, a professor at Texas A&M University and leader in the American Society of Mechanical Engineers’ Nanoengineering for Energy and Sustainability group. We might still be using it, but with materials that have gained some new powers in the lab.

Nanoengineers might dig into the molecular structure of battery materials to speed up how they transfer more voltage per cell. There might be a change in the way the electrolyte conveys lithium ions so that “traffic jams” don’t occur and charging is much faster. You could design a thinner, stronger, but still flexible membrane for batteries that allows for swelling under heat but never breaks. Or go for broke and develop a material that absorbs more lithium ions than carbon, air, or any material we know.

“The fundamental question we need to ask is, ‘How about starting from the bottom up?” Mukherjee says. “That is the mesoscale paradigm that must be addressed. Can we make materials that are more tolerant of what we need batteries to do?”

In the meantime: get perspective

A year ago Segre, of the Illinois Institute of Technology, received a $3.4 million prize from the U.S. Department of Energy to develop a “flow battery” for car applications. Flow batteries store their active chemicals in external tanks and pass it through the battery structure itself. Segre’s work focuses on developing a liquid that is reactive and powerful enough to compensate for the liquid weight trade-off.

A flow battery might work in cars and power grid applications, but it will never work for a phone or laptop. Segre, like most researchers, knows it will be a long series of experiments until researchers hit upon a few different material combinations for batteries. In the meantime, “It’s especially frustrating for most of us because the battery dies, the capacity drops, after a couple years, while the electronics it powers could go on and on.”

For decades, we lived within Moore’s Law, which predicted that the number of transistors packed into a processor would double every two years, providing a steady gallop of technology improvement. We are now approaching a point at which transistors are near atomic-scale, chips can’t fit many more processors, and we’re unhappy with having the same kinds of batteries in our devices.

In other words, when it comes to physics, there’s no app for that. Which can be a bitter pill for tech-savvy consumers to swallow as they become acclimated to regular advancements in every other part of their electronic devices, says Michal Ann Strahilevitz, a professor of marketing at Golden Gate University.

“Adapting to upgrades is easy, and the more you are upgraded, the more you expect further upgrades,” Strahilevitz says. “In a world where [gadgets] keep getting better and more efficient, we feel we have a right to that. We ask, ‘Why can’t they be more wonderful than this?'”

]]>http://fortune.com/2014/08/15/the-next-big-battery-disruption-isnt-coming-next-year/feed/0A rear view of the IIT-Argonne new "nanoelectrofuel" flow battery.soccerrogueWhich wireless carrier should you use when traveling abroad?http://fortune.com/2014/07/30/which-wireless-carrier-should-you-use-when-traveling-abroad/
http://fortune.com/2014/07/30/which-wireless-carrier-should-you-use-when-traveling-abroad/#commentsWed, 30 Jul 2014 17:24:54 +0000http://fortune.com/?p=727360]]>In high school, I took a job selling mobile phones. At the store where I worked, we sold phones for almost every carrier that provided service to our region. Each wireless company had its own set of plans, devices, and--crucially--area of coverage. In the small city in Colorado where I grew up, the last part was often the difference in helping a customer figure out which one to choose.

In those early days, individual wireless carriers didn't offer nationwide coverage. It was patchy at best, and in a sweeping mountain state like mine, it wasn’t too difficult to travel outside one carrier’s coverage zone, putting yourself at risk of outrageous roaming fees as your phone switched to using a rival company’s infrastructure.

A lot has changed since then. It’s difficult to find anyone in the U.S. without a mobile phone, and each carrier’s coverage is far more substantial as a result. Leave the U.S., though, and suddenly you’re transported back to those early days. Your phone can connect to a network, sure--but you’re back to jumping through hoops or paying enormous fees for the courtesy.

Recently I embarked on a trip to Japan (regular readers of this column will note that it’s the same trip where I tested Microsoft’s Surface Pro 3). As I prepared to leave, I wondered what it would take to use my American phone in Asia. So I investigated. Guess what? It may be 2014, but international wireless plans continue to be difficult to decipher. Each carrier approaches the situation differently, partying--courtesy of those staggering fees--like it’s 1999.

So what does it take to use your mobile phone or tablet while in a foreign country? Let's take a look.

I began my research with AT&T, where I am a customer. What I found was puzzling. For overseas service, I was presented with two options. With the first, I could simply opt to add international roaming service to my account. That would put me on the hook to pay for each minute, text message, or byte of data used abroad--far too expensive a proposition for me. The second option allowed me to add a predetermined amount of international service to my account. An extra $70 would buy me 15 minutes, 50 sent text messages (received messages count against your normal plan), and 120 megabytes of data; the prices went up from there, not including the overage fees I could be subject to if I exceeded my purchased amounts.

The options at Verizon Wireless were a bit different, broken down by type of communication. The price of international data was fixed: $25 for 100 megabytes. There was no special rate for international text messaging, so each outgoing message would cost $0.50 and each incoming message $0.05. And voice service? That depended on the country in which you planned to conduct a call. Verizon’s "Global Voice Value Plan" costs $4.99 per month and shaves an average of 20% off the cost of each minute--but it depends on the country. For Japan, each standard minute cost $1.99, which means the plan would be somewhat less, though Verizon’s website lacks an easy way to determine the final cost. One more thing: Because Verizon uses the CDMA network standard, some of its phones won’t work overseas, where the GSM standard is used. (The link I included above can help you determine if your phone model has the right hardware for the job.)

The options at Sprint are very similar to those from Verizon. Sprint doesn't offer an all-encompassing international plan, and charges based on the type of communication. Outgoing international text messages cost $0.50 and incoming messages cost $0.05. The carrier does offer a global voice plan for $4.99 per month that will discount its standard per-minute rate, but like Verizon, the actual price varies based on country. (Unlike Verizon, you can easily see the final cost. For Japan, the effective rate with the plan was $1.29 per minute, discounted from $2.49.) For data usage outside of North America, there are two plans: 40 megabytes for $40 or 85 megabytes for $80. Any more than that is $10 per megabyte. Trips to Canada and Mexico are $30 for 55 megabytes, $75 for 175, or $125 for 325; any further usage is $4 per megabyte. Like Verizon, Sprint uses the CDMA network standard, so some of its phones may not work overseas.

The options at T-Mobile were by far the best, no doubt a product of the company’s decision to aggressively compete with its larger peers. In October, the carrier eliminated roaming fees for global data and text usage for people on its Simple Choice plans. You read that right: if you're a T-Mobile customer, you can travel overseas and worry not about adding extra plans or incurring fees. Voice minutes will set you back $0.20 each when you’re roaming, but compared to the cost of other carriers, that's a bargain. The Simple Choice plans that include these international perks start at $50 per month for 1 gigabyte “high-speed” data or unlimited data at a slower 3G speed. High-speed data while roaming abroad costs extra, but roaming for free on 3G is something I can deal with.

My choice was obvious, of course. I unlocked my AT&T iPhone (using ChronicUnlocks.com) so that it would accept a different carrier’s SIM card, then signed up for a month of service with T-Mobile, which has done away with annual service contracts. Minutes after I landed in Japan, my phone displayed the word "docomo" (a carrier in Japan) and started receiving text messages. (It took about six hours for my phone to start transmitting data, but to be fair, that could be the result of a host of issues that may not have anything to do with T-Mobile.) Once connected, I was able to use my phone as if I was back in the U.S. In my week in Japan, I used about 190 megabytes of data and exchanged 500 text messages. Do the math: with that kind of usage, it’s clear I saved a bundle.

There was one catch, though. When I returned to the United States, it became clear that T-Mobile’s services wouldn’t solve all of my problems. In the small Colorado city I live in the carrier’s network desperately needs some work, leading me back into AT&T’s arms, at least stateside. I suppose some things never change.

“Logged In” is Fortune’s personal technology column, written by Jason Cipriani. Read it on Fortune.com each Tuesday.

]]>http://fortune.com/2014/07/30/which-wireless-carrier-should-you-use-when-traveling-abroad/feed/0Business woman on phone at airport.soccerrogueCan ‘urban mining’ solve the world’s e-waste problem?http://fortune.com/2014/06/26/blueoak-urban-mining-ewaste/
http://fortune.com/2014/06/26/blueoak-urban-mining-ewaste/#commentsThu, 26 Jun 2014 14:28:58 +0000http://fortune.com/?p=729469]]>On a recent, rather stormy Tuesday afternoon, former U.S. vice president Al Gore and an assortment of Silicon Valley executives assembled in an unlikely spot--Osceola, Arkansas--to break ground on a promising new venture.

Backed by $35 million in financing, California-based startup BlueOak Resources is building a brand-new facility in this city of 8,000 or so, but it’s not to manufacture a new high-tech gadget. Quite the opposite, in fact: BlueOak’s new operation will be what it calls the nation’s first “urban mining” refinery dedicated to recovering valuable metals such as gold, silver, copper and palladium from the growing mountains of e-waste currently threatening to overwhelm the planet.

Although between 7% and 10% of the world’s gold and 30% of the silver produced goes into electronics, only 15% of the 50 million tons of e-waste created globally each year undergoes any recycling, Bradoo said. Instead, the vast majority of devices are dumped in landfills or exported to countries where e-waste is hand-picked over open fires.

The city of Guiyu, China--widely considered the world’s e-waste capital--receives some 4,000 tons of the stuff per hour. It also has the highest-ever recorded level of dioxins, and 90% of its residents have neurological damage, Bradoo said. “Not only is it a humanitarian disaster, but when we looked at the value contained in e-scrap, it was shocking,” she added.

With support from the Arkansas Teachers’ Retirement Fund, a consortium of European and domestic investors, and the Arkansas Development Finance Authority, BlueOak’s new refinery will process 15 million pounds of electronic scrap per year initially, rapidly expanding from there. Production will begin by the end of 2015, bringing 50 technical jobs to the area. Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers is one of BlueOak’s major investors.

‘For every ounce, 30 tons of waste’

“Developing a 21st-century, high-quality recovery process for the valuable materials in electronic waste is very important,” said Allen Hershkowitz, senior scientist with the Natural Resources Defense Council's Urban Program.

E-waste is the fastest-growing component of the municipal solid waste stream, and given all the precious metals, valuable plastics and recyclable glass electronics contain, “the fact that these are being routinely discarded makes no sense,” Hershkowitz said.

Indeed, roughly 10 ounces of gold can be extracted from every ton of printed circuit boards, Bradoo said; you’d need to process 100 tons of gold ore or more to get the same amount.

More to the point, “for every ounce of gold that has to be mined in the field, we produce 30 tons of waste” including mercury and cyanide, Hershkowitz said. “Compare that with recovering an ounce of gold from electronic waste--you’d eliminate that gigantic ecological burden.”

There are, of course, U.S. companies already out there that specialize in refurbishing and recycling used electronics--Sims Recycling and ECS Refining are two larger examples. Typically, though, such companies dismantle unrefurbishable devices either manually or with automated shredders to recover their aluminum, steel and plastic but ship the circuit boards to smelters overseas, Bradoo said.

It’s those circuit boards where most of the high-value metals reside, she added. In order to reclaim them in a sustainable way, BlueOak’s facility will take the boards, pulverize them further and put them through a high-temperature plasma-arc furnace.

‘Value recovery from every part of that chain’

Europe has long been ahead of the United States in its e-waste solutions, thanks not just to government mandates and an emphasis on recycling but also to infrastructure already in place there.

“They had domestic secondary smelters that had the capital and the capability to redirect some of their capacity toward e-waste,” Bradoo said.

Even there, though, “there are no facilities we’re aware of that are dedicated to recovering precious metals from electronic scrap,” she said.

Yet while BlueOak’s urban mining refinery may be “exactly the kind of facility that we need from an ecological perspective,” some key economic realities will have to be overcome, NRDC’s Hershkowitz said.

“The challenge here is going to be getting the electronic waste to the facility, because right now only a fraction of electronic waste is effectively recovered for recycling,” he added. “From an economic perspective, we need government requirements, as they have in Europe, that obligate the consumer products companies to participate in funding the infrastructure to recover these materials for recycling or refurbishment.”

Initially, BlueOak will rely on suppliers that are already collecting and dismantling e-waste, but “our hope is that by creating more value in that value chain, that will promote the front-end recycling,” Bradoo said.

The automotive industry is an inspiring model, she noted, with a recycling rate of about 95%. “That’s because you have value recovery from every part of that value chain,” she said. “An entire industry has focused on ensuring that there’s recycling.”

Alternatively, much the way deposit-refund systems have been used successfully to encourage container recycling, it’s possible a similar scheme could be applied to electronics, she said.

Either way, “we want the entire value chain to grow and to create an ecosystem that supports the overall recycling and recovery of as much value as possible from electronics so we don’t think of it as a waste stream,” Bradoo explained.

‘We need to see real leadership’

Approaches like BlueOak’s urban mining refinery “have the potential to be an important part of the solution, to recycle the materials embedded in these devices, reducing the demand for virgin materials and the energy needed to produce them,” said Gary Cook, a senior IT analyst with Greenpeace.

Greenpeace also wants to see more robust efforts from the electronics sector, Cook said, such as stronger take-back programs and a commitment to using recycled materials in electronics products.

But it starts at the top. “What we also need to see is real leadership from electronics manufacturers in creating products that are designed to have a longer life,” Cook said, citing the example of modular mobile phones such as Phonebloks and Project Ara, “and not designed for the dump in two to three years.”

]]>http://fortune.com/2014/06/26/blueoak-urban-mining-ewaste/feed/0Guiyu China electronic wastesoccerrogueForget the iWatch. Headphones are the original wearable techhttp://fortune.com/2014/06/24/apple-beats-headphones-wearable-tech-biometrics/
http://fortune.com/2014/06/24/apple-beats-headphones-wearable-tech-biometrics/#commentsTue, 24 Jun 2014 20:20:26 +0000http://fortune.com/?p=718535]]>With Apple's acquisition of Beats this year, headphones have suddenly become a focal point for the consumer technology industry. If you look closely, though, you’ll realize that they’ve always been there.

We take headphones for granted. We forget they’re jammed in our ears or hanging around our neck. They were “wearable” back when the term meant the shirt at the top of the laundry pile. They have been feeding us data from our smartphones since smartphones existed. Yet they have remained at the margins of the wearable tech rush. Until Apple’s $3 billion buy, that is.

Apple AAPL, as the company is wont to do, has said little about whether its acquisition was driven by talent (namely co-founders Jimmy Iovine and Dr. Dre), technology, or something else entirely. All CEO Tim Cook seems to talk about is how much he loves music. Yet in interviews with Fortune, leaders in headphone design and biometric research say that headphones have the ability to be much more than mere private audio listening devices.

Technophiles have spent the last couple of years obsessing about wearable technology--things like fitness bands, smart watches, and funny-looking glasses intended to give the wearer easier access to information about themselves and the world around them. For headphones, their pre-existing normality may be smart headphones' ace in the competitive hole.

"Headphones were the first mass-accepted wearables," says Noel Lee, founder and CEO of headphone maker Monster and the lead sound engineer for the original Beats headphones. Beats took that normality a step further by turning high-end headphones into fashion accessories fit for a rock or rap star.

But ears also happen to be great sources of biometric information. In many ways, headphones are a more logical place for digital health and sports functions than the electronic wristbands currently in vogue. "You can measure a lot more at the ear than at other parts of the body," says Steven LeBoeuf, a specialist in ear biometrics at the sensor-design firm Valencell. That includes blood pressure, heart rate, ECG, and core body temperature, which is particularly tough to get from a wristband. Headphones may also be better at health monitoring than wristbands because putting them on is already a part of many people's daily routines.

By combining biometric data with other sensors--GPS, an accelerometer, or an advanced sound processing unit--headphones could become a new kind of performance enhancer. "[Your headphones] could figure out if you're cycling, or hunting, or golfing," says I.P. Park, CTO of the audio device manufacturer Harman HAR. "Based on the situation, maybe there are features and services these headphones could provide you."

For instance, when you get on your bicycle, your headphones could automatically let you hear the sounds of nearby cars through your electronic dance music, solving one of the major conflicts between safety and enjoyment for cyclists. Hunters could use specialty headphones to separate game noises from environmental sound. A headphone worn by a football or soccer player could filter out crowd noise and amplify teammates' voices-- a serious blow to Seattle’s “12th Man” or any other deafening fan bases, and a potentially thorny issue for sports commissioners.

Miniaturization has already nearly made it possible for headphones to pack in all that capability. The recent Kickstarter project for Dash earbuds, a wireless pair of earphones made by a company called Bragi, already cram some biometric sensors, a microphone, Bluetooth, and 4GB of storage into a device meant to fit inside a user’s ear. Park predicts that wireless technology will be typical of future headphones as LTE and Wi-Fi connections spread to smaller electronic devices.

Biometrics could also make headphones even more central to the gaming world. There's what LeBeouf calls "relaxation gaming," which would use sound feedback to train a user, such as a therapy patient, to enter a relaxed state. LeBoeuf also imagines using headphone biometrics to affect play in more traditional video games. A biofeedback-enabled game might require you to actually get angry to transform from Bruce Banner into the Incredible Hulk, or a character in a social game could be given a different appearance based on the users' own fitness.

Music and games may be the gateway drugs, but smart headphones could also make sound the basis for information services of a sort we've never seen before. Spike Jonze's 2013 film Her depicted a close relationship between a user and his artificial intelligence-equipped personal assistant, who interacts with him only through an earpiece. Harman's Park thinks that's prophetic. "Earphones or headphones are going to become major information hubs, just like smartphones now."

"But," he adds, "a lot of things have to be done along the way." That includes pushing voice recognition and response technologies much further. "How many people use Google Voice as their dominant interface? It has to be 100% accurate." The same thing goes for Apple’s Siri.

Still, no matter how good natural language processing gets, a full-fledged headphone interface would likely combine voice with gestures through touchpads on the headphones’ surface. Input may also come from head movement, such as nodding your head to one side to skip to the next song.

Smart headphones would be most useful when driven by context rather than command, Park said. He envisions headphones able to anticipate and provide for a user's needs "based on where you are, based on the current context of your situation. We call it augmented hearing." That could include things like providing a tour of a museum or describing landmarks in a new city.

And let’s not forget what headphones were originally designed for. With greater context awareness, connectedness, and processing power, “smart” headphones could enhance the audio listening experience. With biometric and location data, smart headphones could tailor music to moods and moments: heavy metal or dance music for the gym, ambient or modal jazz for the wee hours of the morning.

"The way music gets consumed, we're slaves to convenience. It's always on the go, really low fidelity, high noise," says Marko Plevnik of U.K. consumer research and technology design firm PDD. "It's almost an add-on to another experience. If headphones can add extra poignancy or meaning to music. That's a good thing."

]]>http://fortune.com/2014/06/24/apple-beats-headphones-wearable-tech-biometrics/feed/0beats-snarkitecure-2014soccerrogueWhy 2014 is not the year of wearableshttp://fortune.com/2014/06/20/2014-not-year-wearables/
http://fortune.com/2014/06/20/2014-not-year-wearables/#commentsFri, 20 Jun 2014 20:18:20 +0000http://fortune.com/?p=718404]]>As early as 2008, wearable technology--which can range in anything from measuring your heart rate to curating music based on your mood--has been touted as the next big moment in consumer electronics.

In the wake of the Fitbit and Google’s GOOG Glass, a flurry of companies has flooded the market with iterations of sensor-laden armbands, apparel, and eyewear. It’s a buzzy category, but early adopters seem to be waiting for a moment when they are no longer that guy. (You know. The “Glasshole.”)

But that moment, try as Google might, has yet to come. Some reports have named 2014 as the year when wearable devices will hit the mainstream, but a newer study from L2, a digital research firm, confirms what many have been quietly fighting for: wearables are still not socially acceptable, creating a significant hurdle to further sales.

According to the study, 75% of consumers are aware of wearable technology (whether as futuristic fashion or new-age tech tool), but only 9% actually have any interest in wearing it. A meager 2% admitted to owning a wearable tech device, most of which consist of fitness trackers and smart watches, according to the study.

Wearables typically fall into three categories: complex devices such as fitness trackers; smart accessories such as smart watches, defined by their ability to run third-party applications; and fully autonomous smart wearables that connect directly to the Internet, such as Google’s Glass headset.

Estimates vary, but the research firm IDC projects that wearable tech will exceed 19 million units this year--more than triple last year's sales--and will soar to 111.9 million units by 2018. Credit Suisse values the industry at somewhere between $30 billion and $50 billion in the next two to four years. But before that happens, the nascent market has that pesky wouldn’t-be-caught-dead-wearing-it hurdle to clear.

The June announcement of collaboration between Google and fashion designer Diane von Furstenberg to create a new line of Google Glass underscored Silicon Valley's current strategy to enlist the fashion elite to sanction wearables as de rigueur.

The line of prescriptive frames and sunglasses, named "DVF | Made for Glass," costs upwards of $1,600. Google has already partnered with Luxottica, the eyewear conglomerate behind Ray-Ban and several high-fashion eyewear offerings such as Prada. It also hired fashion executive Ivy Ross, most recently the chief marketing officer of Art.com, to lead its Glass team.

The company is hardly alone in its efforts to woo talent of a different sort. Earlier this year Intel announced a collaboration with the Council of Fashion Designers of America, or CFDA, kicking off a partnership with the high-concept retailer Opening Ceremony to design its smart bracelet. Tory Burch partnered with Fitbit to design pendants and bracelets akin to the Shine Tracker by Misfit Wearables. And Apple AAPL has tapped a diverse group of people, including former Burberry chief executive Angela Ahrendts (to lead its retail efforts), former Yves Saint Laurent CEO Paul Deneve, and former Nike NKE design director Ben Shaffer.

These collaborations signal a moment where the cradle of innovation and the arbiters of fashion are finally embracing one another, says L2 research director Colin Gilbert. Style is not the only missing piece to the wearable puzzle, but it's something to look forward to, Gilbert says. More than half of the report’s respondents want devices that feel more like jewelry while 62 percent would like more than wrist-worn devices.

"Brands that are known for going it alone are partnering with unexpected allies," Gilbert says. "If you dig into Apple's investment, the special projects team reads like a who's who list of some of the best talent in the world coming from every sector imaginable."

The “cool” factor isn’t the only issue. Security and privacy, particularly around the management of consumer data, remain a concern as the tech industry seeks to bring more of our body parts online. As The Economist notes, the glamour of developing sensors and algorithms for wearables is distracting everyone from glaring missing elements, "standards, interoperability, integration and data management" and "intellectual-property rights and regulatory compliance" among them. All this in an environment where paranoia remains over the National Security Administration’s activities.

Atlas Wearables founder Peter Li says battery technology and user retention are two more obstacles facing the wearables market. Some use cases require significant improvements to battery technology for a compelling experience, he says, and there’s always a balance to be struck between wear time between charges and processing power and features.

The pace of innovation has been rapid. Fitbit has released five or six distinct models since the company launched in 2008, and Samsung released three or four variants of the Galaxy Gear in a nine-month period. Sony SNE, Pebble, Google, and Facebook’s FB Oculus Rift are positioned to follow.

"It's very easy to see the leaders in the current market are in a fairly tenuous or precarious position right now," Gilbert says. "That's evident by how quickly they're innovating on each new device type."

Interest in wearable technology isn’t limited to technology companies. Mercedes-Benz is porting its mobile experience to a wearable device, while Virgin Atlantic is exploring the customer service aspect of Google Glass on a trial basis. Kenneth Cole is also using Glass as part of a marketing campaign.

Continued experimentation with wearables is important, but the near-term requires a conversation "about whether current wearables, driven by a combination of organic efforts and corporate tech efforts, are really adhering to customer needs and wants or if companies need to explore a different set of partnerships to push wearables beyond early adopters and into the mainstream," Gilbert says.

The winter holiday season will help thin the herd, but the true litmus test will be when a company can introduce a wearable that passes the "turnaround test," Gilbert says--when a person walks a few steps from their front door and decides to turn around to retrieve a forgotten wearable device like they would a forgotten wallet, keys, or phone.

"Right now the fitness tracker isn't on that list,” he says, “but the next generation of wearables has the potential to pass that critical milestone.”

FORTUNE — For the first time ever, sales of consumer electronics last year in Asia, led by China, exceeded sales in North America. To industry observers and demographers alike, the rapid growth of the Chinese market for consumer electronics comes as no surprise: There are now more than 160 cities in China with a population of more than 1 million people. In the United States, there are just nine.

This year, China's gross domestic product is also expected to rise, to 7.4%, and it is rising faster than that of the United States. Despite this growth, the sale of worldwide consumer electronics in Asia is predicted to drop 1% this year, according to the Consumer Electronics Association.

The dip isn’t out of line with the global outlook for the year: Worldwide tech sales are expected to fall to $1.055 trillion this year, down from $1.068 trillion last year. (Why? For one thing, the tremendous undertow that is price pressure: The prices for technology-related products tend to fall faster than demand rises.) Still, for a rapidly growing market, it is not unreasonable to expect China to buck the global trend.

Amid uncertain global economic trends, the Chinese economy slowed down. That led to a series of falling dominoes: first, a decline in consumer confidence, then, a drop in sales of products that are not considered to be daily necessities. Add the May 2013 cessation of government subsidies for consumer electronic products in China — for several years, the country's consumer electronics market relied on them to help stimulate demand in rural and lower-class areas — and the country’s demand for consumer electronics began to flag.

"We had seen stories where people in China were buying electronics because the subsidies were in place," said Shawn DuBravac, chief economist for the CEA. "People buy products when they have the means, and the subsidies were a big part of this. The products that the Chinese were buying included large-screen TVs — it was like in the United States after World War II, when having a radio and later a TV was a sign of a rising middle class. This is true of all countries around the world, whether it is in Africa, southeast Asia, or China."

Though the subsidies from Beijing have ended, it won't mean an end to China's growing middle class, DuBravac said. "Subsidies have played a role," he told Fortune, "but they are not the defining role."

Officials ended the subsidies because they believe they are no longer needed to drive growth. Disposable income levels in China have increased, they argue, and the replacement cycle for some products will shorten as consumers increasingly opt to upgrade their aging electronics.

Until now, China’s urban markets have driven the country’s growth in consumer electronics sales. But researchers say that the relatively small consumer base in the countryside is poised for growth as the income gap between urban and rural Chinese narrows.

"China's consumer market is young and educated, and Chinese consumers are keen on staying on top of the latest trends," said Josh Crandall, an analyst at NetPop Research. "To do this, they are constantly checking Weibo feeds, Renren updates, as well as tuning into news and information on television. They need their devices to stay in the game. Lowering governmental subsidies is a reflection of the market's current strength. While there may be short-term revenue shortfalls, the long view is strong for consumer electronics companies that serve the world's largest market."

Another reason for the consumer electronics slowdown: increased demand for smartphones, which Chinese consumers are now using to take photos, record video clips, and listen to music, threatening sales of dedicated imaging devices and portable media players. IHS Technology forecasts that shipments of digital still cameras in China by 2017 will have lost 75% of their volume compared to 2009, while personal media players during the same period will be down a debilitating 92%, mirroring trends seen in other areas of the world.

"Globally the smartphone market is about 1.1 billion people," DuBravac said. "Of that, 400 million is just China. The growth now is coming from domestic manufacturers, which is notable in a market that is worldwide dominated by Apple and Samsung. This is also true with most CE products, where more than 50% of sales are from Chinese makers. It is not a super-majority, but domestic sales are still very, very strong."

Consumer electronics sales in China could rebound as early as 2015, even if unit shipments continue to decline slightly. In the meantime, Chinese consumer electronics manufacturers may look to new markets outside of their home country for growth.

"China's makers will continue to develop new markets due to lower or negative growth ratio in domestic, North American and European markets," said Horse Liu, an analyst at IHS Technology.

Further, manufacturers are expected to turn their focus away from shipments now that the growth-stoking subsidies have disappeared. Already, they are putting more energy into high-end products with larger margins to push sales revenue.

"China's leading CE makers will pay more attention to profit margin,” Horse said.